Great video I saw this weekend that really puts into words so well some of the common themes and ideas I have about torture. Former Gov. Ventura is the man! I love how he is able to simply talk over the people on TV who I normally see bully their guests (Bill O, Hannity and the like). Whats even better is that he is speaking sensibly. This is one of the most “Common Men” logic arguments I’ve heard in a long time and Thomas Paine would be proud.

Few thoughts on torture:

• Torture is still torture no matter what you call it (Even Enhanced Interrogation)
• Its wrong and immoral in any circumstance. Even more so when the people have NOT been convicted of a crime – not a show trial, not even a military tribunal.
• When torture is used to extract a confession it is ineffective because the person will likely confess to whatever you want. Torture them right and they’ll tell you they killed JFK. That doesn’t mean they actually did. They may have just wanted you to stop.
• When torture is used to extract information is is also ineffective because whatever useful information is desired is lost in a sea of irrelevant misinformation. Anything said must be verified before it can be acted on. Imagine a counter spy sent to give disinformation and our boys run right into an ambush?
• If torture is such a useful tool to determine the guilt or innocence abroad, why not use it at home against Mexican drug smugglers, coke dealers, and suspected child molesters?
• Why didn’t we torture McVeigh and Nichols?

So we see there are problems with torture. Torture is very bad at getting credible information, and given its nature does a HUGE amount of damage to foreign relations. It also undeniably will increases the brutality that will be used on our soldiers in the future. (You cant get much worse than death, but you can get there a lot slower than a beheading.)

So torture is not very good at determining guilt, but its great at scaring people into compliance, or at least submission. There are a few goals of torture:

1. Reduce a person or group to nonhuman status in their eyes or that of your soldiers
2. Social control by use of fear
3. Extracting information

Finally a few thoughts on what constitutes torture:

• Waterboarding has taken the center stage as the poster torture employed by the US, but there are many other techniques that have been also been approved by the White House under the name “enhanced interrogation”.
• Kidnapping and abduction, immediate sensory deprivation and overload, prolonged sleep deprivation, stress positions, demasulinating activities (forced to carry a purse at all times), forced sexual acts, withholding of food and water or even purposeful schedule mistakes (dinner comes at breakfast, breakfast is served twice in a row and coincidentally during Muslim prayer times, etc) all cumulatively amount to the most sinister torture ever visited on the human body.
• Broken bones heal. A broken mind is a broken person.
• Some of the people in Guitimo have been there for years without formal charges, and It maybe years before they get a trial.
• hundreds of people have been kidnapped and taken to Guantanamo in the past, were tortured, and dozens have since been released without charges.
• The CIA stated that they will close all secret Black Site prisons. Which sounds good, except the government continued to deny that the secret detention centers even exsisted until well after the story had broken on national press. Then they acknowledged that a few might have existed. Then the story grew and they admitted they had been conducing extraordinary rendition (aka secretly kidnapping people without notifying their government and taking them to foreign countries where torture could legally be preformed by the CIA or its subcontractors).
• When they close Guantanamo, look for the policy that was legal there to become legal here AND/OR When the Black Sites we know about close, they will be reopened somewhere else further from view and their bloody work will continue.